US vice presidents past and present traded blows on Sunday with Joe Biden, accusing his predecessor Dick Cheney of trying to “rewrite history” by painting US President Barack Obama’s administration as soft on terror.
Cheney, 69, portrayed Obama and the Democrats as alarmingly naive on national security and said Biden was “dead wrong” when he stated recently that another attack on the scale of Sept. 11 terror attacks was “unlikely.”
“I think they need to do everything they can to prevent it. And if the mindset is ‘it’s not likely,’ then it’s difficult to mobilize the resources and get people to give it the kind of priority that it deserves,” Cheney told ABC television.
Biden countered that al-Qaeda was now “on the run” and said: “Dick Cheney’s a fine fellow. He’s entitled to his own opinion. He’s not entitled to rewrite history. He’s not entitled to his own facts.”
The clashes, in tit-for-tat interviews with three TV networks that allowed each to see clips of the other, were a battle royal between long-time rivals bitterly opposed on foreign affairs and national security.
Cheney, the hawkish architect of former president George W. Bush’s counter-terrorism policy, said he still supported waterboarding and suggested it could have been used on Nigerian jet bomb suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
Employed during the Bush era to try to extract information from key al-Qaeda suspects after Sept. 11, waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques were outlawed by Obama who said they went against US ideals.
The Obama administration has repudiated Bush-Cheney tactics in the “war on terror,” with the president last March saying their treatment of prisoners had caused “incredible damage to our image and position in the world.”
Obama tried unsuccessfully to shut down Guantanamo in his first year in office as he navigated US foreign policy away from “axis of evil,” “war on terror” style politics toward a more engaged, less combative approach.
Biden said that the US authorities were getting “significant information” from Abdulmutallab and that he “continued to talk because we have handled him in a way that encouraged him to talk.”
US justice officials say the 23-year-old Nigerian, who has apparently confessed to being trained by al-Qaeda in Yemen to blow up a Detroit-bound passenger plane on Christmas Day, is cooperating well.
Biden denied Republican charges the Nigerian should have been handed over to the military and pointed out that British shoe bomber Richard Reid was treated exactly the same way as Abdulmutallab by the Bush administration in 2001.
Cheney, recalling a “major shootout” on such issues with the Justice Department when vice president, accused Obama of dangerously framing “terror attacks against the United States as criminal acts, as opposed to acts of war.”
“I think we have to treat it as a war. This is a strategic threat to the United States. I think that’s why we were successful for seven-and-a-half years in avoiding a further major attack against the United States,” he said.
Cheney defended the notorious US detention center at Guantanamo Bay and attacked Obama’s decision to try self-confessed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court in New York.
It’s “a big, big mistake,” Cheney said. “It gives him a huge platform to promulgate his particular brand of propaganda around the world. I think he ought to be tried at Guantanamo in front of a military commission.”
Cheney, who after Sept. 11 presided over expansions of executive power with little judicial oversight, is accused by some of seeking to defend systematic torture that fueled anti-US sentiment in the Muslim world.
Biden, a 67-year-old former head of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Cheney was either “misinformed” or deliberately “misinforming” the American people.
“I don’t know where Dick Cheney has been,” Biden said. “Look, it’s one thing, again, to criticize. It’s another thing to sort of rewrite history. What is he talking about?”
For all Cheney’s talk about military tribunals, Biden said the Bush administration had only tried three suspected terrorists that way, two of whom were now walking the streets, free men.
Tempting fate, Biden then went on to claim that Osama bin Laden’s followers were on the run and “not able to do anything remotely like they were in the past.”
“We’ve eliminated 12 of their top 20 people. We have taken out 100 of their associates,” Biden said. “We’ve sent them underground.”
MINERAL DEPOSITS: The Pacific nation is looking for new foreign partners after its agreement with Canada’s Metals Co was terminated ‘mutually’ at the end of last year Pacific nation Kiribati says it is exploring a deep-sea mining partnership with China, dangling access to a vast patch of Pacific Ocean harboring coveted metals and minerals. Beijing has been ramping up efforts to court Pacific nations sitting on lucrative seafloor deposits of cobalt, nickel and copper — recently inking a cooperation deal with Cook Islands. Kiribati opened discussions with Chinese Ambassador Zhou Limin (周立民) after a longstanding agreement with leading deep-sea mining outfit The Metals Co fell through. “The talk provides an exciting opportunity to explore potential collaboration for the sustainable exploration of the deep-ocean resources in Kiribati,” the government said
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
Indonesia’s parliament yesterday amended a law to allow members of the military to hold more government roles, despite criticisms that it would expand the armed forces’ role in civilian affairs. The revision to the armed forces law, pushed mainly by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s coalition, was aimed at expanding the military’s role beyond defense in a country long influenced by its armed forces. The amendment has sparked fears of a return to the era of former Indonesian president Suharto, who ex-general Prabowo once served and who used military figures to crack down on dissent. “Now it’s the time for us to ask the
The central Dutch city of Utrecht has installed a “fish doorbell” on a river lock that lets viewers of an online livestream alert authorities to fish being held up as they make their springtime migration to shallow spawning grounds. The idea is simple: An underwater camera at Utrecht’s Weerdsluis lock sends live footage to a Web site. When somebody watching the site sees a fish, they can click a button that sends a screenshot to organizers. When they see enough fish, they alert a water worker who opens the lock to let the fish swim through. Now in its fifth year, the
RSS